Sock Knitting Again

I like to try different sock yarns, so this time I was using some Kroy that was in the stash.  I was a little alarmed when I read that the yardage was only 166 yards for each ball of yarn since I thought that around 400 yards was needed to make two socks.  This was a very stressful sock knit because it looked like there would not be enough yarn.  I barely had enough yarn, and there is not that extra little bit left to do any major mending needed in the future, so I think I will stick with other brands from now on.  My daughter is rather petite with a small foot, so I don't think you could have enough yarn to make a man's sock at all without using more than one skein per sock and having to weave in ends in the body of the sock.  It also seemed like the yarn in one of the skeins was thicker than the yarn in the second skein.  Anyway, I did manage to get two nice socks out of it:

Here's all the yarn I had left from the second sock with a dime beside it for reference:

It's finally getting cooler now, at least in the mornings and evenings though the days can climb to the 90's.  Time to start finishing up my sweaters and making new ones.

Finally, A Finished Object

Too bad the color of this afghan doesn't seem to photograph very well because it looks so  much better in person.  There are several shades of pink and one variegated yarn with a pop of orange.  It is a nice lap-sized blanket.  I was really really tired of working on it by the end, though. The mint green yarn was a little hard to crochet, but it did wash up nicely.

 I finally went with a simple shell edging which looks pretty good.  This was the first time I have used the 'crochet-it-together-as-you-go' method, and it sure is better than hand sewing all the motifs together.

My unfinished sweater inventory is getting bigger since it is still too hot to have a lap full of sweater, so at present I have three sweaters that need buttons and one sweater to sew together, and about three sets of ribbings ready to be made into sweaters.

July Knitting

If the temperature hadn't spiked to 111 degrees for two days and stayed in the 90's until now, there would be a lot more knitting going on.  As it is, my projects are languishing until the temperature goes down.  In the meantime, all the fruit ripened and had to be put up (and the extras taken to the Food Bank), and the first batches of pesto were made and frozen.  My basil crop is fabulous this year, so lush and plentiful.  I buy souffle cups from the restaurant supply store, little 2 oz. plastic cups with lids in size P325, and freeze the pesto in them.  So far I have made over 75 cups full, and it's only July.  I like to supply my daughters with enough pesto for their freezers, too.

There are several sweaters in the works.  A lovely yellow cardigan just needs assembly:

 

There are only two more rows to add to the afghan:

The ribbings are hand knit for a purple pullover, and the first one is hung on the machine:

 I want to try something I've never done before with this pullover.  I am going to add lace panels up the center front and have them curve along the V-neck with the decreases on the outside of the panel.

There's also a new cardigan draft to test out in red yarn for my daughter, and some teal ribbings being knit.  All the unassembled sweaters shown in my last post have been sewn together and just need their buttons sewn on.  It's too hot to have a lap full of sweater though, so that will have to wait.

Today will not involve any knitting since the 4th of July is tomorrow and we are celebrating my daughter's birthday, too.  I have some macaroni salad to make today and some cucumbers to marinate.

Three New Sweaters in the Works

I've never grown Amaryllis before, but since we grow Resurrection Lilies, which are really a kind of amaryllis, I think, I decided to give it a try.  Here they are, blooming away by the birdbath.  I don't know if they will live through next winter, but this is an experiment.

There are three sweaters in various degrees of completion at the moment.

These two cardigans will be jackets like my pink one.  The emerald green one has the same garter/eyelet borders, but the navy blue one has plain garter borders.

This cardigan is just for fun, to try out a variegated yarn.  This colorway looks pretty layered over an aqua tank I have which tones down the flashy nature of the yarn.

This is what happens when you produce sweaters so quickly -  you end up with several to sew together and do all the finishing.  We'll see how fast I am able to get them done.  The variegated cardigan is the latest draft of my raglan sweater with a few extra stitches added to the sleeve top.  It seems to fit nicely but you can't really tell until after the first washing.

The leftovers afghan is stalled at the moment though, and the gray and gold sweater is still waiting for its buttons.

Variegated Yarn

After I used up my red/yellow/orange variegated yarn (leftover from an afghan) to make the Flashy Cardigan to wear to Stitches, I was pleased at how well the raglan sweater draft fit.  During a recent  sale at the fabric store, some more variegated yarn was purchased, mainly because there was aqua in the colorway.  I could visualize a cardigan over an aqua tank worn with my tan trousers.  The color repeat is larger in this new yarn, so I was interested to see how the color sections would pool or stripe. The Flashy Cardigan yarn had very short color sections.  Who knows, maybe these fun yarns will come back into fashion!  I doubt it, but who cares?

The Flashy Cardigan

The only thing I wanted to change on my raglan pattern was the top of the sleeve.  There's supposed to be about an inch of stitches left that become part of the neckline, but because the gauge is only 4+ stitches/inch, the seam allowances used up about half of that, so I wanted to add a few more stitches.  Here's how my patterns look when I'm ready to use them:

 All the numbers with circles around them are row count numbers to tell me when to make increases or decreases.  This is one feature of a knitting machine that is great, but you can get the same effect with hand knitting by putting a safety pin every 20 rows or so.  That way you can get the row count in a few seconds instead of having to count every row, every time.

The ribbings are knitted ahead of time by hand and are hung on the machine instead of a cast-on.  This gives a more hand-knit look to the garment, and besides, I get to use the cast on that my grandmother taught me.  This picture shows the sleeve ribs waiting in their bowl.

 

 

 

So far I've finished the back and front:

Look at the funny pooling on the upper back!  You can never tell ahead of time what will develop.  As usual, I am wondering if there is enough yarn, since I only have one and a half skeins left, but time will tell.  It's not as if a dye lot difference will be noticeable.

Socks!

The afghan I am working on is proceeding slowly, but in the meantime, I finished the first pair of socks I have knitted in over a year!

The repeat was so large in this yarn that I would have had to splice the yarn somewhere, so I just knitted an asymmetric pair.  The yarn is some Sockotta I picked up from a sale table at Stitches about two years ago for only $5 a skein.  Sockotta can seem hard to knit unless you have the right needles (bamboo or wood are horrible for this) since it has a lot of cotton in it.  I've used it to make several pairs of socks for the girls, and they say it is comfortable to wear.

In future sweater news, the two sweaters that I have enjoyed the most out of the 9 or so sweaters I made recently are the pink jacket and the aqua lace.

I have plans to make more of these.  The aqua one would look nice in a purple, and I want to make the eyelet jacket in a cocoa brown and other colors.  The aqua one could be done in different lace stitches so I will have to look through my stitch dictionaries and get some ideas.

Vegetable Garden

This year we are expanding the vegetable garden.  Most of the new space came from back of the yard which used to be covered in awful ivy.  It took months for the spouse to dig it up and take down the old fence it was growing on, but now it is wide open and sunny back there.  There is a chainlink fence dividing us from the back neighbors, and they have said that they hate the fence and will replace it at some point, but in this economy, that may take years.  I've always wanted a chainlink fence to grow things on, so this year I'm planting the squashes and some sweet peas (flower) along there.  The added benefit is that it may shield us from the attempted attacks of their dog, Oscar.  Maybe if he can't see us, he'll ignore us.

Yesterday I got started on the seed starting.  So far, there are sweet peas and lettuces sprouting, but today I'll get going on the squashes and cucumbers.Here are some views of the garden in its wild spring state before the weeding and plowing.

The first climbing rose of the year bloomed this week. I think this is Pinata.

Projects in the Works

Sometimes it is Spring here, and sometimes it is rainy winter, so not much happening on the 'getting the garden going' front.  I have all my seeds but need to get them started.  Inside, there are lots of projects continuting:

The 'Use Up The Leftovers' Afghan

Trying to be efficient about it

A Dark Orchid V-Neck pullover

Socks for A

  It's been a long time since I felt like knitting socks but I'm on a roll now.  The second pair were originally a 'toe-up' pair with the first sock half completed.  I guess I wasn't in the mood for toe-up because those poor socks had been sitting untouched for over a year.  Since it was time to be ruthless, I ripped them out and started again.  I'm a little annoyed with this Sockotta color because the color repeat is so large.  Maybe that was why it was on the sale table at Stitches. I decided not to stress over it and just make some mismatched socks.  My daughter doesn't care, and you can't be perfectly symmetric all the time.  Or so I am telling myself.

Still Unfinished

All the knitting has been done for several weeks, but I got sidetracked starting a new sweater and sewing some blouses, so this neglected cardigan still needs to have its ends darned in and its buttons sewn on.  Other than that, I think it turned out very well, and I want to try another one using a variegated yarn for the colorwork.  After exercising my brain to figure out how to make a pattern fit into the available stitches, I realized that I didn't need to as long as the pattern mirrored itself across the front edges.  What I did was to center the pattern on the center back, then put markers for every pattern repeat around to the center front.  This made the patterns match (mostly) at center front.  Good enough, anyway.

Need a lot of markers for a project?  I just bought a box of brightly colored plastic straws and cut one into thin rounds to use for markers.  The whole box of straws cost less than $2 and I only used part of one straw, so it didn't matter if the marker took a flyer and lost itself under the couch, I just got another one from the container.  Cheap and effective.  Plus, it isn't a tragedy if you accidentally vacuum one up.

New Afghan or Maybe a Baby Blanket

There was a lot of yarn leftover from the African Flower afghan, so I am trying to use up some of that pink.  I had a pound of minty color for the background and some leftovers from the aqua lace cardigan, so those are getting used up also.  My goal is to not buy any more yarn but to just use what there is.  So far, so good.  I'm thinking it will probably end up as a small baby blanket, 5 squares across and 7 squares down.

 It's interesting and much better to crochet the squares together as you go along, but this requires a layout plan before you start.  I'm doing diagonal rows of color.  I found the flat braid method of crocheting them together online:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080112104311/http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/lffunt/flatbraid.htm

http://www.yarncrazy.com/?page=2

It's nice to have a crochet project in the works to pick up when you are tired of sewing a sweater together.  The yoke cardigan is mostly finished except for sewing in the ends and sewing on the buttons.  That was a really interesting knit.

Yoke Knitting

There are only a few pattern rows left to knit on the yoke of my first round-yoke sweater.  There was definitely a learning curve in the tension and yarn-holding department.  I had to figure out how to hold two yarns at once, one in each hand and make it work for me without falling into the trap of too tight tension.  One of the only other times I tried to knit a fair isle sweater, I held the yarns too tightly and the knitting was not smooth on the front side.  I still don't know if the first draft of this sweater will work out, but it is looking pretty good so far.  There was one try on with all the stitches moved to a long string, and it looked like I am right on track.  Since my gauge for the color knitting is a little bigger than the stockinette, I wondered if my yoke depth was going to work out since I forgot to figure in the neck ribbing, but I think everything is OK.  There is still one more decrease row to do after this pattern section.

Last week I saw several greeting cards on my cookbook shelf and decided to look through them.  I found a nice gift card to JoAnns that I had forgotten about.  I should really look through my greeting cards more often since this is not the first time I have forgotten a gift card.  I spent the gift card on, what else, more yarn.

Round Yoke Sweater

In my long knitting life, I have never really done much Fair Isle knitting.  Always willing to learn a new skill, my next sweater is a round yoke cardigan in dark gray with gold patterning.  I'm using up the leftover yarn from the gold cardigan, but I doubt if I will have enough.  If I have to buy new yarn, I'll make a matching gold hat from the leftovers from that skein.  Using my TNT cardigan pattern, I drafted the first version of a round yoke cardigan.  Don't know yet if it will work out or not, but on the other hand, I'm definitely learning how to do a better job at two-color knitting.

All of the plain stockinette portions were knit on the knitting machine (ribs were done by hand).  The yarn is worsted weight, and the fronts and backs were shaped at the top with short rows.  Short rows are really easy to do on a knitting machine.  I used an old pattern pamphlet I had in the stash for the Fair Isle design, but I moved it around a bit and changed it so much that it no longer looks anything like the original.

At first I thought the pattern knitting was a royal pain, but I seem to be getting into the swing of things, and my tension has certainly improved.  I'm tired of the long, long row, though, and am looking forward to the first decrease round.

Royal Blue

The poor Flashy Cardigan is still draped over the back of the couch, waiting for me to sew on its buttons.  In the meantime, I've started another cardigan, a royal blue one which has been waiting years to get on the machine.  Sometimes when I am at loose ends and can't decide what project to start, I just grab a skein of yarn and knit the ribbings by hand for whenever I get around to that sweater.  At the start of this year, I had two sets of ribbings stuck in a bag in the sewing room, a lemon yellow set and the royal blue set.  I have a really pretty pin my daughter made for me that has royal blue beads on it, and I wanted a plain V-neck cardigan to highlight the pin.  I just did a search for royal blue on the blog and see that these poor ribbings have been languishing in their bag since 2009.  Not anymore, though.

The sweater parts are all knitted and ready to assemble. I had the navy blue yarn all ready to go, but I happened to see the ribbings and decided to do that sweater first.  Now that I have done one darkish blue sweater, I'll have to put the navy away until after I knit a brighter color.  Wouldn't want to do two dark blues in a row.  This sweater is the Modified Raglan I drafted, and it will be interesting to see how it fits.

There is some medium gray yarn in the stash, and some leftover mustard yellow yarn, so maybe I'll try out a round yoke design with the main body gray and the patterning in yellow.  So many ideas to try.

UPDATE:  I finished this up and tried it on.  It looked pretty horrible on me especially the experimental neckline design.  The next time my daughter came over, I had her try it on, and it looked very good on her.  Her shoulder line is more square than mine so her frame held up the swearer in a more flattering way.  I gave it to her and she took it home for its first wash.  She said that it softened up nicely the way most Red Heart yarns do.

African Flower Square: No More Hexagons

Well, this works up very nicely and is easy to do.  This is the square version from the video online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r8g1tq8VU0

The only difference is that I started with a Ch 5 circle instead of the magic ring and 7 sc called for. I'm going to have to try the magic ring method some day. I must have watched that video 5 or 6 times, writing down what she said so that I could write out instructions for myself.  Here's what I came up with: 

Version from video:

Make magic ring and 7 sc.  Close Ring with a SlSt

2^nd rnd:  Chain 3 for turning chain, 1 dc into same place, ch 1,  (2dc, ch 1) in each stitch around and close with slst.  Should be 8 pairs of dc.

Change Colors:  

    In a gap between dcs put (3 ch, 1 dc, ch 2, 2 dc, ch 1) and after that first one do (2 dc, ch 2, 2 dc, ch1) in each gap. Close with sl st.  Should be 8 petals.

    With same color for next row, in first ch 2 space put (ch 3, 6 dc, ch 1),  then in subsequent spaces put (7 dc, ch 1).

Change Color:

  Start in the middle of a petal, make 1 turning chain, then 1 sc in every stitch, make long stitch down to between the 2 dcs of previous row between the petals.

Change to Frame Color:

At a notch, make a Ch 2 turning chain,  sk 1 st, 1 hdc, 3 sc, 1 hdc, sk 1,  2 tr, ch 2, 2 tr (all in the same place), sk 1,  1 hdc, 3 sc, 1 hdc, sk 1,  1 hdc into notch, sk 1, 1 hdc, 3 sc, 1 hdc, sk 1. Another corner:  2 tr, ch 2, 2 tr  and continue around.

Last row:  Chain 2 for turning chain, 1 hdc into every st until corner.  
 Corner = 2 hdc, ch 2, 2 hdc.  Continue around in this manner.   

Enough Yarn!!

It was a close call, but the Flashy Cardigan sweater is nearly finished.  I have to sew in the ends and sew on the buttons.Sorry about the blurry photo, but the charge on the camera died right after I took the picture.

Here's all the yarn that was left (those balls of yarn are teeny tiny):

The best part of this project was trying out the newly drafted raglan sweater pattern.  It looked great when I tried it on, a first for me and raglan sweaters.  I've already done a Version #2 pattern in which the front raglan seam is moved forward a bit so that the top of the sleeve is wider and slopes down towards the front.  I think this is called a Modified Raglan, but I'd have to look that up to be sure.  I could really use a navy cardigan, so that will be my next project.  Not an exciting color, but so useful.  But first, I have to finish up this one.

Enough Yarn?

Nearing the finish line and am half done knitting the last sleeve.  Strangely enough, I might just have enough yarn.  I usually use the regular skeins, which have about 364 yds, and I can get a 3/4-length sleeve cardigan out of three skeins, but these leftover skeins have less yardage because the yarn is variegated.  The variegated skeins have about 280 yds.  Multiplying this out, my usual cardigan takes around 1100 yds, and I should have almost exactly that out of the 4 skeins of variegated yard.  I'm afraid that one of the skeins was a partial skein, though, so it will be a close finish.

I redrafted my set-in sleeve pattern (self drafted) to have raglan sleeves because I was just so tired of setting in the other sleeves.  I did try a raglan sweater on once and it didn't look that great on me, but I am hoping that the lowered neckline and shorter sleeves will help with that.  We'll soon see.  What I'd really like to do is adapt the pattern to have a round yoke because there are all sorts of pretty things you can do with that shape.  I'd probably knit all the stockinette portions on the machine and do the yoke patterning by hand.

Turquoise V-Neck Pullover

 This pullover was pretty fast to knit and is much more of a turquoise color that didn't show up well in the photo.  I'm trying to replace my collection of worn-out sweatshirts with some nice pullovers to wear around the house, and this is the second one.  The first one was a fuchsia U-neck with lace borders, but I wore it to a tea party, and it just came out of the wash.  I'll have to find it and take pictures of it.

 The closer view shows the V-neckline.  I usually have just one center stitch, but by the time I got to the neckline division, I had an extra stitch from who knows where, so I just incorporated it.  The next picture shows the side seam with the increases and decreases to give it a more fitted shape.  The yarn will calm down and flatten out when I wash it, and the increases and decreases will not show much. This sweater also took three skeins of Red Heart Supersaver at a total cost of about $7.50.  Not having any buttons keeps the cost down, too.

 

Right now I have the multi-color sweater in progress on the machine.  This is the yarn leftover from the afghan I made, so I thought I would make a very bright, flashy cardigan.  My daughter says that if I hurry up and finish it up, I can wear it to Stitches, and she will be able to see me across the vast market auditorium if we get separated.  It looks like I might not have enough yarn, though, which is how things usually work out for me.  I try to use up extra yarn and end up buying more.

Can you see the cookie tin behind the the center post of the machine?  It was given to me by a friend at the office who was from the Philippines.  It has a circular hole in the top that exactly fits the yarn cakes produced by my yarn winder, and keeps the yarn from moving around while the machine pulls the yarn from the center.  So if you are lucky enough to have Asian or Filipino grocery stores near you, look for this product, because the tin is great, and the cookies are tasty.